Weblog Software Priced to Move

A factoid from a Ben and Mena Trott interview for anyone starting a mom-and-pop business selling commercial weblog software:

Mena Trott: For the two years that we were just Ben and myself, the donations and commercial licenses supported Ben and myself to run the operation, and we never had to use our savings to pay for our rent or anything; this covered our costs. And we've had a lot of downloads and we've had -- numbers have been really large, but the average price, I mean the average --

Ben Trott: The average donation per download --

Mena: -- is 38 cents, lifetime, not per month! So 38 cents is basically what people have paid for Movable Type, and that's because of the generosity of other people that have decided that they wanted to pay.

Movable Type · 2004/12/16 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Searching the Web for Copycats

Here's a useful application of the Google API: Copyscape, a free service that can find Web sites plagiarizing your content.

The service takes any URL as input, looking for a suspicious number of matching words on other sites. Most hits for Workbench came from sites and aggregators making legitimate use of my RSS feed.

Copyscape found several plagiarists of my book Sams Teach Yourself Java 1.1 in 24 Hours, using the first chapter as input.

The service might be too fast on the trigger: Another suspected copywronger was a person who quoted one of my jokes as his .SIG.

Publishing · 2004/12/16 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Graham Hamilton reviews NetBeans 4.0, Sun's free integrated development environment for Java. The new version replaces the old project management system, which required folders and JAR files to be explicitly mounted before they could be employed in a class.

I tried NetBeans out recently, finding the new version to be faster and simpler than its predecessor. However, I don't like IDEs that force users to learn a new interface with each version, so I'm sticking with the source code editor UltraEdit.

Java · 2004/12/16 · Comment · Link

From the Law Office of Cease and Desist

Got a nice letter from the Washington Times today threatening to make me read their newspaper unless I deleted the full text of one of their articles from the Drudge Retort message board.

Actually, the letter was more tactfully worded, probably because brazen republication of the paper's work has been going on for years on Free Republic:

Dear Mr. Cadenhead:

I note that you republished a copyrighted news story and photo (Topic: Vets Rage Over Kerry Photo) from The Washington Times on your web site. While we are flattered that you value the story and the photo, I must bring to your attention the issue of copyright. Unless our records are incomplete, you did not obtain permission to republish the article on your site. If this is not accurate, please let me know immediately.

If you wish to republish this article, please contact me to to arrange republication permission. We charge a reprint fee and require a copyright line and link to our main site.

The Washington Times does not own the copyright to the photo that ran with this article. Please contact Corbis via their web site to obtain permission to republish the photo.

For future reference, we do not require advance permission if you only run a headline and link to our site for the complete text.

If you choose not to obtain our permission to republish the article, you are hereby instructed to remove the article from your web site immediately. Please let me know how you wish to proceed.

Thank you,
Christine Reed
The Washington Times

I edited the user's message to remove the full text, leaving behind the lead and a link to the article. The photo was never published on the Drudge Retort server, which does not store images submitted by users. It was presented directly from the Washington Times server using an IMG tag like this:

<img src="http://ekzemplo.com/picture.jpg">

The Dilbert lawyers made the same mistake in a cease-and-desist letter last year, believing I was hosting a parody of the world's least funny comic strip on a message board.

2004/12/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Ben Hammersley: "The combination of comment spammers, and the database calls made by mt-comments.cgi and MT-Blacklist, is putting so much load on servers that the admins are having to pull sites down to save the others."

I haven't used MT-Blacklist for my Movable Type sites, because I am loathe to trust third parties to provide up-to-date and correct blacklists. I'm having good results so far by simply closing old entries to comments and trackback.

Movable Type · 2004/12/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Departing Anchorman is Rather Odd

When Dan Rather leaves CBS Evening News in March, America will lose our best chance to see an anchorman completely blow his top on live television, Howard Beale style.

During the Jennings-Brokaw-Rather era of network news, there has never been question who the weirdest anchor was. Wikipedia runs down a few rather odd moments, from the disturbing "what's the frequency, Kenneth?" mugging to his telling people "Courage" at the end of broadcasts for one week in September 1986, at which point he chickened out in the face of widespread mockery.

As a Texan myself, I will most miss Rather's clumsy attempts at folksy metaphors, especially when he's vamping during a live broadcast. He says so many odd things that they've come to be known as ratherisms. One from Election Night 2000 turned out to be a pretty good description of the broadcast media's performance that evening:

Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon.

Many ratherisms lose some of their homespun wisdom by virtue of being completely made up, rather than something that Texans have been saying to each other for decades as we talk between spittoon shots at the local saloon at the end of a cattle drive before bedding a comely schoolmarm. Lately, Rather's been trying to invent a new double-adverb, tee-totally, me-mortally.

A 2003 appearance on Larry King Live:

King: Time magazine is reporting that some Arab leaders are encouraging a scene whereby Saddam Hussein is overthrown, exiled or possibly taken out. What are you hearing about that over there, Dan?

Rather: Larry, I've seen absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally no indication of that in traveling around Iraq, principally in and around Baghdad.

On Election Night 2004:

Lawyers are swarming over Ohio like locusts. And there are going to be more of 'em there tomorrow, and more of 'em the day after ... [Bush's people are] absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally convinced they’re going to carry Ohio.

A Google search shows this adverb to be completely original to the anchorman. No English speakers appear to have ever used it in a sentence unless they were quoting him.

So to Dan Rather I say, you will tee-totally, me-mortally be missed. Courage.

Journalism · Jargon · 2004/12/15 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway.

Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn.

I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry:

I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it?

I'll be fighting the last-minute Christmas crowds at the post office to mail out these books, dodging surly Floridians with holiday cheer deficiency syndrome who have dug hideous sweaters out from storage for our first (and perhaps last) freeze. Wish me luck.

Movable Type · Publishing · 2004/12/14 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries